Claudia Emerson – författare

Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss, loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself. With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the ""stuttered eloquence"" of an auctioneer and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly ""coughing up light.""In this postlapsarian pastoral of the modern Southeast, Andrews summons a cast of characters bound to times and places of desolation, yet unable to leave because it is that very desolation, the plagues, the scourges, the losses and heartbreak, that has defined them. Their collective cry of exultant despair is compressed in the astonishing final lines of ""Plagues"": ""Pharaoh, Pharaoh, as if there were something keeping us, as if we could be let go.""Andrews brings to these poems a vision so clear, so miraculously right, that the pages themselves seem suffused with the scents of sunlight and new-mown hay. Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a lovely, spellbinding reminder of what we discard, what we keep, and why.

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live on: ""In the dream that recurs, like a bird returning, the place is still as it was, as though they went away, years ago, fully intending to be back by first dark.""Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose, ""the change-of-life baby"", after the death of her mother: ""The hens had hidden their heads beneath / their wings; they blinded themselves as I dusted / the kneading bowl with fi‚our sifted fine as silk, and so / I disappeared as I sank my fists into it."" Preacher feels keenly the burden of running the farm and fears being the last one to live on the place: ""I was held fast there, pinioned, not / dying, growing numb and light, wait-crazed / and finally calm."" Both wrestle with a desire for independence and the duty to home they are bound to by birth; neither marries or leaves.Pinion is ultimately a wrenching elegy that Rose creates. She is the one who escaped, only to realise ""I survive them all, but I find I have become the house they keep.

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples' respective losses. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called ""All Girls School,"" offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively ""school"" - or refuse to - the poems explore ways girls are ""trained"" in the broadest sense of the word.""Gossips,"" the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In ""Early Lessons,"" the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.The Mannequin above Main Street MotorsWhen the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable, one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark - drunken impulse - and for years kept her leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk was also perpetual in the garage below,punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained,back turned forever to the dark storagebehind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing - her expression still reluctant figure for it.

Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson's Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet's brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson's unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful.The macabre title poem refers to the old custom of making daguerreotypes, primitive photographs, of deceased loved ones. Other striking poems describe animal deaths - mysterious calf killings, a hog slaughter, the burial of a dead jay, ""identifiable / but light, dry, its eyes vacant orbits."" Death, as the speaker's heart and mind instruct her, exists in a shadow world. When the body disappears, the shadow also flees. By securing the shadow, the poet finds a representation of the dead's soul, a soul always linked to the body. Hence, Emerson's attention to the minute details of the body's repose - reflected in the long, related sequence of refrained poems - never allows its memory to fade.

With graceful lines swooping like a bird in flight, Claudia Emerson's newest collection explores the harsh realities of aging and the limitations of the human body, as well as the loneliness, fear, and anger that can accompany us as we live. Keenly observed and beautifully executed, these poems move from the grim façade that hides beauty-prosthetic eyes- to the beautiful scene that conceals violence-a rural retreat. Emerson also considers once common things that are fast becoming obsolete: cursive writing, telephone booths, barbers. At once hopeful and cognizant of all the reasons why humans might despair, these poems echo with remarkable insight into the true nature of life.

This posthumous volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson explores the suspended state of existence that illness imposes upon its sufferers - what she calls the ""impossible bottle."" With a strong will and a self-deprecating awareness of the instinct to seek meaning in metaphor, she confronts the indignities, fears, and moments of grace in a struggle with cancer. Her poems forge unlikely connections between the present reality and memories of the past, such as an MRI scan conjuring up images of a June expedition through a tunnel under a Maryland mountain.Rooted equally in the sterility of the hospital and the vitality of the natural world, Impossible Bottle mines the trappings of illness, showing how disease attempts to rob us of our humanity even as it reminds us of our mortality.

In Claude before Time and Space, her final collection, Pulitzer Prize- winning poet Claudia Emerson quietly but fiercely explores the themes of mortality and time.In the first section of this book, The Wheel, Emerson uses a rural southern setting in poems that reflect on memory, the self, and relationships. In section two, Bird Ephemera, she explores historical figures- from an early naturalist and writer who raised her children in poverty to a small-town doctor. The collection concludes with a series of poems named after the poet's father. This illuminating body of work displays a master poet at the height of her craft.

The poetry of Claudia Emerson is marked by a precise, evocative handling of subjects drawn from her upbringing in the rural South yet recognizable to readers across cultures: complicated family histories, the eccentricities of place, the frustrations of illness, the pleasures of language and environment. Speakers drawn from history and local settings recount narratives of loss, struggle, and perseverance. The natural world glistens with beauty and vitality. Cancer overtakes the body, producing a suspended state of existence. Everyday objects suggest universal truths and mysteries. Ungrafted offers more than two dozen previously uncollected poems left in manuscript at the time of Emerson's death, alongside generous selections from all her previous books. Assembled by her longtime editor Dave Smith, Ungrafted adds a final volume to the legacy of the writer described by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as ""one of the most honored, decorated, and revered poets in Virginia history.